I can predict with safety that the prosecution of 700 innocent postmasters and mistresses will be remembered for decades.
It was not just that when the Post Office jailed employees and drove them to suicide it presided over one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in modern British history.
You can listen to the Lowdown on psycho bosses via Apple (see below) Spotify, Android and every other hosting site.
It is that the injustice will be remembered far beyond the UK. The technology said the postal workers were guilty of stealing from their tills, and everyone – judges, juries, police officers and government ministers – believed the faulty software rather than innocent men and women.
As facial recognition technologies take over police work and AI determines job prospects, the story of how the Post Office computers got it wrong will be a part of 21st century folklore.
But this terrible scandal deserves to be remembered for one other reason: the attitude of managers, who did not for a moment think there was something wrong in believing that hundreds of their colleagues were criminals.
The notion that the accusations must be flawed because the scale of the alleged fraud and the numbers of suspects beggared belief never occurred to them. They justified their salaries and bonuses as a legitimate reward for presiding over underlings who were no better than common criminals.
Chris Dillow, the author of the Stumbling and Mumbling economics blog, is one of the best critics of the managerialist ideology that drove the Post Office scandal. You can listen to my Lowdown interview with him via the links above.
I thought it would be worth going through the evidence we discuss on the show as we look at the dictatorial attitude of so many managers.
We are not making an argument for anarchism. Successful organisations have successful managers.
They tend to be modest managers who understand that it is impossible for the people at the top of complex organisations to know all they need to know. They have genuine consultations with their staff to fill the gaps in the knowledge. They do not behave like dictators by insisting on subservience and by refusing to allow criticism.
However many managers, perhaps most managers, are not like that. And here is the main reason.
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